“Isn’t there another road to the opera?” Weyland said.
“Just this one; and somehow during opera season it does tend to get torn up.” She chattered on about how Santa Feans had a standing joke that their streets were regularly destroyed in summer solely to annoy the tourists.
Weyland stopped listening.
* * *
In the parking lot young people in jeans and windbreakers waved their flashlights, shouting, “This way, please,” to incoming drivers. People had formed a line at the standing-room window. The ushers stood, arms full of thick program books, talking in the sunken patio beyond the ticket gate.
* * *
Tremain checked in with the stage manager, who told him that the costume shop had finished mending the shirt for the dummy of Angelotti used in Act Three. That meant that tonight Tremain wouldn’t have to strip after his part was over in Act One, give up his costume to the dummy, and then change back again for curtain calls. He took this for a good sign and cheerfully went down to the musicians’ area to pick up his mail.
Members of the orchestra lounged down here, talking, playing cards in the practice rooms, getting their instruments from the cage in back and tuning up. Tremain flirted with one of the cellists, teasing her into coming to the party after the show tonight.
In the narrow conductor’s office off the musicians’ area, Rolf Anders paced. He wished now for just one more run-through with the backstage chorus in Act Two. The assistant conductor, working from a TV monitor, had to keep his backstage players and singers a fraction ahead of Anders and a fraction sharp for their music to sound right out front.
Anders looked forward to shedding his nervousness in the heat of performance. Some people said that every opera conductor should do Tosca each season to discharge his aggressions.
* * *
Three ticket-takers stationed themselves beside the slotted stub boxes, and the long iron gate swung wide. The people who had pooled on the steps and round the box office began to stream down into the sunken patio in front of the opera house. First comers sat down on the raised central fountain or the low walls containing foundation plantings of white petunias. From these vantage points they observed the clear but fading light flooding the sky, or watched and discussed the passing pageant.
Here an opera cape from another era, the crushed black velvet setting off an elegant neck; there blue jeans and a down-filled vest. Here a suit of Victorian cut complete with waistcoat, flowered buttonhole, and watch chain, the wearer sporting between slim, ringed fingers an even slimmer cane; there a rugby shirt. Here a sport jacket in big orange-and-green checks over green slacks—and there, unbelievably, its double just passing in the opposite direction on a larger man who clearly shopped at the same men’s store. Everywhere was the gleam of heavy silver, the sky hardness of turquoise, sparkle of diamond, shimmer of plaited iridescent feathers, glitter of baroquely twisted gold.
A church group of white-haired women, come for the evening in a chartered bus, stood goggling, a bouquet of pastel polyester flowers.
The house manager, in sober evening dress, moved nimbly through the crowd, sizing up the house, keeping track of mood and movement and the good manners of his ushers.
* * *
Jean, standing on her toes, spotted McGrath—stumpy, freckled, thinning on top—at the fountain. He had with him young Elmo Archuleta, a painter he was wooing for the gallery.
“That’s Albert McGrath; would you mind going over and introducing yourself?” she said to Dr. Weyland. “I have to make a dash for the ladies’ room.” Jean and McGrath were at odds over her plans to leave the gallery and return to the East. These days she spent as little time as she could around McGrath.
Dr. Weyland grunted disagreeably, tucked his raincoat over his arm, and went to join them.
God save us, thought Jean, from the grouchy great.
* * *
“Pleased to meet you, Professor,” McGrath said. So this was the hotshot anthropologist the university people were crowing about; handsome, in a sour, arrogant way, and he still had his hair. Some guys got all the luck.
McGrath introduced Elmo, who was scarred with acne and very shy. He explained that Elmo was a hot young local artist. Jean was undoubtedly trying to steer the kid away from the gallery, to retaliate for McGrath’s refusal to let her walk out on their partnership. McGrath let slip no chance to praise Elmo, whose work he really liked. He flourished his enthusiasm.
The professor looked with undisguised boredom at Elmo, who was visibly shrinking into himself.
“Nice ride up?” McGrath said.
“An exceedingly slow ride.”
Here comes Jean, thank God, McGrath thought. “Hiya, Jean-girl!” She was little and always fighting her weight, trying at thirty-two to keep looking like a kid. And sharp—you’d never guess how sharp from her round, candid face and breathless manner. Smart and devious, that was Easterners for you.
The professor said, “I think the altitude has affected me. I’d like to go in and sit down. No, please, all of you stay and enjoy the parade here. I’ll see you later inside. May I have my ticket stub, please?”
He left them.
Jean smiled at Elmo. “Hi, Elmo. Is this your first time at the opera?”
“Sure is,” McGrath answered. “I got him a seat down front at the last minute. And speaking of last-minute luck, I’ve wangled an invitation to a party afterward. Lots of important people will be there.” He paused. She was going to let him down, he could see it coming.
“Oh, I wish I’d known earlier,” she said. “I have to be back in Albuquerque early tomorrow morning to meet some clients at the gallery.”
McGrath smiled past Jean at a couple he knew from someplace. “I’ll take Elmo and the professor with me, then. He doesn’t seem exactly friendly, this Weyland. Anything wrong?”
“He barely said a word on the way up. All I know is what I hear: this is a high-powered academic with a good book behind him; bachelor, tough in class—a workaholic, recently recovered from some kind of breakdown.”
McGrath shook his head. “I don’t know why they hire these high-strung, snotty Easterners when there’s plenty of good local men looking for jobs.” Giving Jean no time to respond, he walked away to talk to the couple he knew from someplace.
* * *
Jean said, “Is McGrath treating you okay, Elmo?”
“He’s like all gallery people. They treat you nice until you sign up with them, and then they bring out the whip.” Elmo flushed and looked down at his shiny boot toes; he liked Jean. “I didn’t mean you. Are you still trying to get clear of McGrath?”
She sighed. “He won’t let me out of the contract. He keeps saying New Mexico needs me. That’s what happens when you’re dumb enough to make yourself indispensable.”
“How come you don’t like it out here anymore?”
“I’m not as adaptable as I thought I was,” she said ruefully. “The transplant just isn’t working.”
Elmo studied her brown hair, its soft, dull sheen. She was ten years his senior, which somehow made it easy for him to like her. He hoped she wouldn’t go back East. That felt like a bad wish toward her, so he said impulsively, “Why don’t you just up and go? You got enough money to fly back to New York.”
She shook her head. “I need to go home with at least as much as I brought out here. You can’t live in New York on the stub of a plane ticket.”
* * *
Weyland took his seat. The theater was quiet, the stage set—there was no curtain—was softly illuminated. The house doors had just been opened, and most of the people were still out on the patio.
He definitely did not feel right. The tedious trip had put an edge on his fatigue. And they always wanted to talk; all the way up he had felt the pressure of Jean Gray’s desire for conversation distracting him from the restful sweep of the land and sky. Now, here, the fashionable crowd had reminded him uncomfortably of something—Alan Reese’s followers, the spectators at the ce
ll door . . . All left behind now. He thrust away the thought and leaned back to look a long time through the open roof at the deepening evening. If he could only walk out now into the dark, quiet hills, his keen night vision would aid him to find a hollow where he could lie down and settle his system with a nap—though at best sleep was difficult for him. By nature perpetually on the alert, he was roused by the least disturbance. Still, he could try—he wondered whether anyone would notice if he rose and slipped away.
Too late: another blink of the house lights, and the crowd came drifting down among the stepped rows of seats. Jean Gray sat down next to him, McGrath next to her.
She said to Weyland, “Well, what do you think? It’s not a great big opera house like the Met in New York, but it has charm.”
He knew he should respond, should make some effort to ingratiate himself. But he could bring himself to offer only a curt syllable of assent, followed by sullen silence.
* * *
With Anders standing ready beside her, Renée Spiegel said into the console mic, “Places, everyone, please.”
The backstage speakers echoed, “Places, everyone, please.”
She signaled the final blinking warnings of the house lights and then dispatched Anders to the podium. His image walked onto her TV monitor screen.
There was no foot-shuffling applause from the musicians when Anders entered the pit; he had lost his temper with them too often during rehearsals. The audience applauded him. He bowed. He turned and opened his score.
Spiegel, watching him on the monitor, called the lighting booth: “Warning, Light Cue One . . .”
Anders breathed deeply and gave the down beat.
“Cue One—”
Out crashed the first of the chords announcing the power of the dreaded Minister of Police, Baron Scarpia.
“Go!” Spiegel said.
The lights came up on an interior portion of the Church of Sant’ Andrea della Valle in Rome, the year 1800. Scarpia’s chords were transformed into the staggering music of flight. Tremain, as the escaped political prisoner Angelotti, rushed onstage into the church to hide.
* * *
In the lighting booth between the two sections of the balcony seating, a technician hit the switch that started the tape player. A cannon shot boomed from the house speakers. The technician grinned to herself, remembering the time her partner, stepping inside to relay a cue invisible from within the booth, had put a foot among the wires and yanked them out. The cannon shots of Act One had been drums that night.
Things could go wrong, things did go wrong, but it was never what you expected.
* * *
Floria Tosca on this stage bore no resemblance to the thin, dark woman named Floria whom Weyland had known in New York. This singer probably wasn’t even a brunette—her eyes looked blue to him. His uneasy curiosity allayed, Weyland watched inattentively. He was turning over and over in his mind the layout of the university buildings, reviewing the hunting methods he could employ there until less risky opportunities to secure his prey developed.
Something onstage caught his attention. Scarpia was addressing Tosca for the first time, offering her on his own fingertips holy water from the stoup. He lifted his hand slightly as she withdrew hers, so that their contact was prolonged. After a startled glance of distaste at him, Tosca plunged again into jealous anxiety over her lover Cavaradossi’s unexpected absence from the church. Scarpia moved downstage behind her, step for step, singing a polite inquiry into the cause of her distress. His tone was caressingly sensual and insinuating over a lively pealing of bells and courtly flourishes in the strings.
Intrigued by Scarpia’s calculated maneuvering, Weyland lost interest when Tosca flew into a tantrum. He went back to pondering his new hunting ground.
* * *
The Te Deum, the great close of the first act, began. What a spectacle it was, Jean thought admiringly. The small stage seemed enlarged by the pageant in white, black, and scarlet entering at a grave, swaying pace behind Scarpia’s back.
Scarpia mused on his own plans, oblivious to all else. He had deduced that Tosca’s lover Cavaradossi was aiding the fugitive Angelotti out of sympathy with the latter’s support of Bonaparte. Now Scarpia hoped that Tosca would go to Cavaradossi, and Scarpia’s men would follow her without her knowledge and take the quarry.
The Police Minister’s soliloquy, the lighter bells sounding the theme of his first suave approaches to Tosca, the great B-flat bell tolling, the organ, the choral voices, the measured booming of the cannon, all combined to thrilling effect; and the rich public virtue of the religious procession was set off against Scarpia’s private villainy. As his sinuous melody wove around the solid structure of the celebrants’ Te Deum, the long crescendo built.
Scarpia’s voice seemed to ring effortlessly over the music, first an iron determination to recapture Angelotti; then a glowing outpouring of lust, luxuriant, powerful with assurance that soon Tosca would lie in his own arms—“Illanguidir,” the voice glided down then surged upward with erotic strength on the final syllable; “—d’amor . . .”
Waking abruptly to his surroundings, he joined the chorus in full voice, and suddenly the morality of the State, as conveyed by the liturgy, and the personal evil of Scarpia were also united: one the underside of the other, both together the essence of official hypocrisy.
Scarpia knelt. Three times brass and drums shouted the savage ascent of whole tones declaring his implacable ferocity, the lights vanished, the first of the three acts was over.
Jean sat back, sighing deeply. Around her people began to clap, standing, shouting, or turning to talk excitedly to one another.
Applauding, she turned also, but Dr. Weyland had gone.
* * *
Weyland walked in the parking lot. People moved among the cars under pools of light from the tall lampposts, talking and laughing, singing snatches of melody. They took from their cars scarves, gloves, blankets, hats. The breeze had an edge now.
Facing the wind, Weyland opened his jacket, unknotted his tie, and undid the top button of his shirt. He felt unpleasantly warm, almost feverish, and very tired. Even if he were to plead illness and retire to the back seat of the car, he knew he was too restless now to sleep.
He turned uneasily back toward the patio, a concourse of loud, volatile humanity. Crowds of people, their feelings and bodies in turbulent motion, always seemed threatening to him—unpredictable, irrational, as easily swept to savagery as to tears. And the music had been powerful; even he had felt his hackles stir.
Why? Art should not matter. Yet he responded—first to the ballet, back in New York, and now to this. He was disturbed by a sense of something new in himself, as if recent events had exposed an unexpected weakness.
Best to arrange the possibility of an unobtrusive exit during the next act, in case he should find himself too uncomfortable to sit it out.
* * *
In the musicians’ area people drifted and talked. Tremain, done performing for the evening but still in costume, stood reading over the shoulder of a flutist who was absorbed in a battered paperback titled The Revenge of the Androids.
The conductor sat in his room massaging the back of his neck, trying to regain his calm without going flat. Now that everyone was warmed up, the evening was taking shape as one of those rare occasions when the opera’s life, which is larger than life, fills the house, electrifying audience and performers alike and including them all in one magnificent experience. He felt the temptation to give in before the excitement and rush the tempi, which would only throw everyone off and spoil the performance.
Relax. Relax. Anders took deep breaths and yawned at last.
* * *
People congregated around the Opera Guild booth, where posters, T-shirts, and other souvenirs were being sold.
“I know Scarpia’s an awful monster,” said a woman in a tailored wool suit, “but he has such wonderful music, so mean and gorgeous, it makes the old heart go pitapat. I’m always a lit
tle bit ashamed of loving Puccini’s operas—there’s that current of cruelty—but the melodies are so sensuous and so lyrical, your better judgment just melts away.”
The younger woman to whom she spoke smiled vaguely at her.
“The second act is a real grabber,” continued the wool-suited woman. “First Scarpia tells how he likes caveman tactics better than courting with flowers and music. Then he has the poor tenor, Cavaradossi I mean, tortured until Tosca gives in and tells where Angelotti’s hiding, and they haul Cavaradossi off to prison. And then Scarpia says if she wants to save Cavaradossi from execution for treason, she has to come to bed with him. He has this absolutely palpitating, ecstatic music—”
The young man who was her escort drawled, “Rutting music.”
The young woman smiled vaguely. High again, thought the wool-suited woman disgustedly; where does she think she is, some damn rock concert?
“Come on,” the wool-suited woman said. “We have to buy a T-shirt for Brother. A friend of mine is selling for the Guild tonight: her—that little lady with the short white hair and bright eyes. See the magenta sari she’s wearing? She got that in India; she’s been to China too; a great traveler. Hi, Juliet, let me introduce my sister . . .”
* * *
Jean took her intermission coffee black, which was bad-tasting but not fattening. “What a show we’re getting tonight—a perfect introduction to opera for you, Elmo.”
“I didn’t like it,” Elmo said unhappily. “I mean, it was like watching an animal in church pretending to be a man.”
“You know,” Jean said, “I read somewhere that Puccini had a strong primitive streak. He loved hunting, shooting birds and such. Maybe it wouldn’t be too far off to see his Scarpia as a sort of throwback to a more bestial, elemental type.” Elmo looked lost. Jean shifted gears: “You know the costume Tosca wore, the plumed hat, the dress with rustling skirts, the long cane? It’s traditional; the first singer to play the role wore a similar outfit at the opening in Rome, in 1900.”
Unexpectedly, Dr. Weyland spoke close beside her: “Sarah Bernhardt wore the same in Sardou’s play La Tosca more than ten years earlier. She carried also, I believe, a bouquet of flowers.”
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